The co-owners of a greenfield Melbourne practice that opened in 2020 explain how they became the first and only optometrist in Australia – and the first single independent practice in the world – to achieve B Corp certification.
When Generation Z (18-24 years old) job seekers are looking at potential employers, one of the factors they consider is whether the business is a certified B Corporation, says Seekers Optical co-director Mr Kye O’Donnell.
The same kind of thinking applies to consumers: they prefer purchasing products from certified B Corporations, or ‘B Corps’. That was the case for co-director, optometrist Dr Jayson Stone, who originally learned about certified B Corps through a now-favourite clothing brand of his, Patagonia.
B Corps are businesses that meet high standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. A not-for-profit movement, B Corps “envision a better economic system where businesses can benefit people, communities, and the planet”, the official website explains. Businesses who obtain the sought-after label also “choose long-term investments over quick wins, and measure their success based on the positive impact they create”.
B Corp is a growing movement, and there are now more than 7,000 certified businesses spanning across more than 161 industries; more than 560 are based in Australia and New Zealand.
Stone wanted Seekers in Gertrude Street – an iconic strip in the trendy inner Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy – to be one of them.
“I’d always envisaged owning my own practice at some point. I wanted Seekers to benefit everybody who was involved in it – us, as owners, but also our team members, patients and customers, and the environment,” he says.
“Gone are the days where you can simply say to customers, ‘We’re sustainable, we do this, and we do that’ without having to prove it. For us, B Corp is a way to formalise our credentials, and demonstrate to our customers we’re actually doing it, we’re meeting stringent standards.”
Tested in every direction
The process for Seekers to be B Corp certified has taken over 12 months.
“You can’t apply to become a B Corp until you’ve been operating for at least a year,” O’Donnell, who was integral in getting the accreditation over the line, says.
“You’ve got to measure your positive impact on community, employees, environment, governance, and customers and meet requirements across each of those five standards. You need to respond to set questions, tailored to your sector, and your business impact model – demonstrating how you’re trying to make a difference, essentially,” he says.
Seekers was assessed in the retail pathway, as a health and wellness business model. The first step in the process involved completing a points-based online self-assessment, which allocated an impact score. The B Lab verification team then reviewed and verified Stone and O’Donnell’s self-assessment.
“It took a couple of months to complete the initial self-assessment because there’s hundreds of questions to answer and you need to understand how their question applies to optometry,” O’Donnell, who is also Seekers’ lab manager and technician, says.
The verification process took longer, with wait times of over six months due to the popularity of B Corp certification.
“There’s a lot of global organisations wanting to become a B Corp so you’re placed in a queue. We had to wait about nine months for them to verify our self-assessment. We were then assigned an analyst, who requested documentary evidence to support our self-assessment and asked additional questions,” O’Donnell says.
“We worked with three different analysts, including one solely for a quality assurance step, but it’s all been online through B Lab’s online assessment tool.”
As part of the health and wellbeing business impact model, Stone and O’Donnell had to demonstrate how they’re providing long-term benefits to their customers.
“We had to provide peer reviewed journal articles as evidence that routine examinations and early detection results in better outcomes for our patients, and we had to show how we support that,” Stone says.
“The fact that we do OCT scans on every patient, for example, is a way of demonstrating that we’re providing long-term care for them.”
Seekers’ sustainable practices
Stone, who became an optical dispenser in 2003 before completing his training as an optometrist in 2016, and O’Donnell have one employee – retail manager and buyer, Mr Kenny Chua. Seekers is also part of Eyebenefit, an optical buying group for independent owner-operated optical stores.
They stock high quality ethically made frames, including plant-based acetates, and titanium metal frames, for their strength and durability.
“We encourage our patients to re-use their existing frames as part of our re-use, re-lens, re-cycle program. We offer a 20% discount off any lenses put into an existing frame, because it’s sustainable. That’s the reason why we sell master crafted frames, because they have longer life expectancy,” Stone says.
“We’ve also teamed up with TerraCycle, so patients can recycle contact lenses, and blister packs. They take home a satchel made from a plant-based material and fill it with their used contact lenses and blister packs, and when they purchase a new supply of contact lenses, they bring in the satchel and we empty it into our TerraCycle box. We also recycle display lenses from spectacle frames, and patients’ used lenses when they replace the lenses in their existing frames.”
To meet B Lab’s high standards of governance, Stone and O’Donnell had to engage lawyers to amend their constitution.
“It’s about transparency and making sure the public knows who is behind the organisation and that it is independently owned. It’s about transparency for employees as well, keeping them constantly informed about business performance, and financial status. For example, we have a monthly KPI report that gets circulated amongst the team,” O’Donnell says.
“There was a legal change we had to make to our constitution, as directors, to be legally required to balance profits against community, environmental, sustainability, and ethical business objectives.”
Stone and O’Donnell donate $1,000 each quarter to a chosen charity, and have done so since day one of opening their practice, equating to about $12,000 in total.
“We began with choosing a charity ourselves and made a donation but now, each quarter, when patients are collecting their glasses, we offer them the option to vote between three charities, and whichever gets the most votes, we donate to. We’ve now donated to more than 12 charities,” Stone says.
“When patients come in to collect their glasses, we let them know which charity received the donation. We also encourage patients to offer suggestions of which charities to support the following quarter.”
Some charities they’ve supported have been local, including the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service based in Fitzroy, others have been optometry focused, such as the Outback Vision mobile clinic in Western Australia, and some have supported women’s reproductive choices and the LGBTIQ+ community.
To maintain their B Corp status, Stone and O’Donnell will have to repeat the assessment process once every three years – but that has its benefits, O’Donnell says.
“Going through the process has helped us achieve more than we would have on our own accord. Doing it again might shed light on different areas to improve in the future,” he says.
And there’s another incentive: “Some consumers will opt for B Corp practices, or only purchase from B Corp businesses. Up until this point, there hasn’t been a B Corp optometry option in Australia. Our certification is published on the B Corp directory, including our assessment scores,” Stone says.
“Some employees prefer to work for B Corporations, and we prefer to deal with them. For example, we bank with Bank Australia, which is a B Corp, and get our toilet paper from Who Gives a Crap.”
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